Shen Wei

Shen Wei is a Chinese-American choreographer, painter, and director who resides in New York City.

Widely recognized for his defining vision of an intercultural and interdisciplinary mode of movement-based performance, Shen Wei creates original works that employ an assortment of media elements, including dance, painting, sound, sculpture, theater and video.

Frequently, critics have commented on his innovative blend of Asian and Western sensibilities, as well as his syncretic approach to performance art.

Shen (family name) Wei (give name) was born in 1968 in Hunan, China to an artist family during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

His father is a Chinese opera director, performer and calligrapher, and his mother is a theater producer.

Both of Shen Wei's brothers are visual artists.

Shen Wei left home at the age of nine to study classical Chinese Opera at The Hunan Arts School (now: Hunan Vocational College of the Arts) for more than 6 years (1978–1984).

His training included voice, dance and theater performance.

At the same time he also self-taught Chinese Traditional Painting and calligraphy.

Following China's reestablishment of diplomatic and economic ties to the West in the early 1980s, Shen Wei began to study western classic oil painting techniques and styles of artists such as Michelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Modigliani, Francis Bacon and Lucian Michael Freud.

From 1984 to 1989 Shen Wei was a member of the Hunan State Xian Opera Company, performing leading roles in the company.

In 1989 he discovered a passion for modern dance and moved to Guangzhou to study at China's first modern dance education institution, the Guangzhou Modern Dance Academy.

During his two years at the academy he was taught by master teachers such as Ross Parks and David Hochoy from the Martha Graham Dance Company, Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin from the Jose Limon Dance Company, Claudia Gitelman from Alwin Nikolais Dance Company, and Liz Walton from the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

The program was jointly supported by the American Dance Festival and the Asian Cultural Council.

During the early 1990s he created 10 dance works for the Guangdong Modern Dance Company and many oil paintings.

"Still Child", "Racing With The Sun", "Colored Relations" and "Insomnia" became part of the repertory of the company during this time.

Additionally, he is the one of China's first underground experimental performing artists.

In 1991, Shen Wei became one of the founding members of the China's first modern dance company, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, choreographing and dancing with the company until 1994.

Shen Wei's early work is influenced by multiple disciplines within traditional Chinese and Western art.

In 1994 he created his one-man, experimental multi-media show "Small Room", which toured in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Hong Kong, and which catapulted him into the public eye.

In 1994 he was awarded the First Prize in both Choreography and Performance at the National Modern Dance Competition in China.

After receiving a three-month scholarship from the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab, Shen Wei moved to New York City on Jan 15, 1995 and began his 5 years of artistic experimentation in New York City.

During this time he expanded his artistic knowledge, studying artists such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini, Mark Rothko, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Igor Stravinsky, and Steve Reich.

In dance, he explored release techniques from which he began to develop his own movement language.

Shen Wei also performed for Murray Louis and was part of four of Martha Clarke's productions.

Additionally, he began creating works for the American Dance Festival and Alvin Ailey II.

In 1997, Cloud Gate Dance Theater toured his revised version of "The Bed" commissioned by American Dance Festival in 1995.

He also toured his one-man show "Small Room" at The Palace Theater in London, The Asia Society in NYC and Hollins College in VA.

In 2000, he founded Shen Wei Dance Arts and became the artistic director of the contemporary dance company.

The works he has created for the company is based on his own dance technique created over the past 12 years, a movement language he calls "natural body development".

In recent years, Shen Wei has expanded his artistry to include large-scale multimedia works showcasing original art installations, and original video and animation material.

Shen Wei's 13 major movement-based works has toured in 30 countries in 130 cities.

After 5 years of living in New York, Shen Wei began to develop a style of movement that has been described as "enigmatic" and "dream-like", and which is exemplified by "Folding" (2000), "Near The Terrace, Part I & II" (2000–2001) "Behind Resonance" (2001).

According to Anna Kisselgoff, in these early pieces, the surrealist aesthetic emerges as a result of a disruption in what Shen Wei calls, "natural elements," such as regular breathing cycles, which affects the quality of movement in dancers.

Folding and Near the Terrace have also been described as "kinetic tableus,"; the entire dance space characterized by swathes of color and sculptural movement.

In 2004, Shen Wei received the Nijinsky Award for Emerging Choreographer, in 2007, he received the MacArthur Award, in 2022 he received the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement in Choreography and the ISPA Distinguished Artist Award.

Shen Wei has been commissioned by the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, the Park Avenue Armory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, and the TeatroDell'Opera di Roma, as well as contemporary ballet companies such as Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal.

For each new work he choreographs, Shen Wei typically designs all the visual elements including the sets, costumes and make-up, film projection and lighting as well.

In addition to creating works for the proscenium, Shen Wei has also created works for fashion shows, art exhibition openings, and other cultural productions for international companies.

In July 2008, he choreographed a fashion show at Paris Haute Couture for the label WUYONG, by the Chinese designer Ma Ke.